Quotes About Literature

I've just finished reading 'The Second Plane,' and I think it's some of the best non-fiction I've ever read.

I can't persuade myself that one of the problems facing the planet today might be a shortage of books by me.

Originally I had planned to write just a couple of children's books and then, return the focus on adult literature. A funny thing happened along the way - I kept having new ideas, and then I looked up one day, and 30 years had passed!

Collections aren't really planned. I just keep writing short pieces until I have enough for a collection.

The novels I planned to write were never going to be funny books about Jews. They were going to be country house books. Only later on could I write what I knew I was best at writing about.

Bookstores should be located not only on campuses or on main drags, but at the assembly plant's gates, also.

And, I mean, I think poetry does need to be met to some extent, especially, I guess, 19th century poetry, and for me, it's just been so worth the effort. It's like I'm planting a garden in my head.

I wanted to show platonic friendship between men and women, because I think it is underutilised in fiction.

I like to play football, read some books, study.

I used to play all the time. I would play football when it was light and read when it was dark.

Plays by people like Martin McDonagh and Brian Friel attract huge audiences, not because they're Irish, but because they're brilliant plays.

You can give me any of Shakespeare's plays and I'll tell you a parallel African folktale.

But those two plays left me on fresh terms with language. I didn't always have to speak in my own voice.

A lot of my stories are inspired by Japanese folklore or literature or movies: I've done stories based on Kabuki and Noh plays, and on Kurosawa's 'Yojimbo' movies.

All playwrights should be dead for three hundred years.

Who ever converses among old books will be hard to please among the new.

I've nothing against kids reading anything they please, but I do have a problem with pink books for girls and black books for boys.

I don't believe for one moment you can write well what you wouldn't read for pleasure.

The pleasure of reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.

My mother was largely a housewife until she and my father were divorced. No one in the family read for pleasure - it was a very unintellectual household - but my mother did read to us when we were little, and that's how I started to read.

While it can be pleasurable to move speedily through a work of fiction, there's a different sort of pleasure to be had in lingering, backtracking, rereading the same page.

Literature is my calling To hold up the mirror to my countrymen comes natural to me; and in the open field of invention I am not without hopes of giving them pleasure.

But if Shakespeare himself is maybe about meaning and truth, I don't know, then he is certainly about pleasure and interest, we start with pleasure and interest, but maybe eventually it gets to meaning and truth.

One of my greatest pleasures is falling into a story someone else has written.